The ability to cook prepared food easily, quickly, consistently, and economically is a recognized need. Automation is a highly desired feature of household and industrial cooking devices. Another desirable aspect of a cooking device is the ability to heat/cook foods of differing types and viscosity together. Rotational cooking facilitates consistency of outcome over a wide variety foods and recipes. Furthermore, automating the rotational cooking further enhances consistency.
Tilting a rotational cooking unit over a range of angles facilitates variable cooking functions, which in turn can facilitate variable recipes and food types. The addition of stirring/mixing apparatus into a rotating cooking vessel can further facilitate quality and consistency of the end result.
Thus, if all of these features are available to an end user, he, or she, need not be proficient at cooking to attain quality and consistency in his, or her, preferred prepared items. Controlling time, temperature and speed, as well as rotation, tilt and direction typically affect to the outcome of a given recipe. In addition, varying these functions during the time a recipe is cooking can further help a user attain perfect, and, possibly, consistently unique results.
All foods and substances are not created equal, and it is important to be able to adjust automated functions individually, or in connection with each other, to make sure the contents are uniformly heated throughout the entire mass and/or browned and/or mixed to the desired end result of the contents as a whole. However, a user may not wish to stand close by food being cooked to change the functions and to monitor the cooking food for safety purposes. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and system for facilitating the functions of rotating, heating, mixing/stirring, tilting and sealing that do not require that a user remain in proximity to the device performing the cooking functions.
Furthermore, safety in cooking devices is always a concern. For devices into which liquids are introduced and heated, there is a need to prevent spillage during operation or during idle. Another safety hazard is heating or burning of an object, person or animal that contacts a housing of a cooking device. While cooking devices are expected to be warm to the touch during operation, serious burning to an item that contacts the housing is not acceptable. Thus, there is a need to provide a method and system that can facilitate the features discussed above and still provide a wide margin of safety to a user and the device's surroundings.
In addition, since cooking in liquid typically causes steam, or at least higher pressure due to expansion of the cooking liquid as it heats, internal pressure in a cooking unit should be relieved to prevent injury to a user by the inadvertent removal of a lid or unexpected, instantaneous, depressurization of the unit. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and system for cooking food that equalizes pressure between the inside and outside of a cooking vessel. Others have attempted to facilitate a few of the above-mentioned desirable features in cooking devices, an example of such an attempt being an automated rotating cooker. Devices for indoor grilling or slow cooking of food utilize stationary cooking surfaces such as heated plates, grills, or ceramic pots to heat food by touching only one or two surfaces of the food within. Some rotational and cylindrical cooking devices present continuous contact of a heated surface to the contents of the device.
A few devices have included spatulas connected to the base or other parts to move across a stationary cooking surface to aid in stirring the food. Furthermore, a few devices have permanently incorporated paddles onto the interior wall of the vessel to aid in stirring the contents.
However, known devices have many shortcomings that can be traced to the following:
Conventional devices in use for indoor grilling or slow cooking of food have stationary cooking surfaces, which limit and localize the heating of the food by those devices. In those devices, the same part of the food being cooked typically remains in contact with the heated surface, or surfaces, thus not allowing the food to be evenly cooked.
Moreover, these conventional grilling devices do not allow for automated, unattended cooking or preparation of the food. These conventional devices require constant attention by the user in order to manually stir or move the food inside the device to avoid improper or uneven cooking and poor quality in the results.
These conventional grilling devices present the danger of an unattended unit burning or singeing the food contained within and possibly causing safety issues for a house or workplace through the creation of smoke or fire.
Furthermore, conventional devices may undercook portions of the food that are too far from the cooking surface, thus presenting the possibility of food poisoning, because one portion of the food may look browned and cooked to the operator, thereby misleading the user to think all the food is cooked to the appropriate temperature.
Devices used for grilling do not allow the introduction of liquid into the cooking method.
Other shortcomings of known cooking devices used for slow cooking include the lack of optional immediate cooking or grilling or boiling at a higher surface temperature, and require the presence of liquid to achieve results. Known cooking devices also do not have the ability to alternate automatically or manually between grilling, boiling, and slow cooking, and many known devices have only one resting position for use and do not distinguish between types of foods being cooked or allow the introduction of an infinite number of accessory devices to aid in the differing types of food being cooked.
In addition, known devices that may rotate only facilitate rotation in a single direction, potentially limiting a preferred method of cooking or stirring contents. Another shortcoming of known devices is that known devices provide heat at a predetermined location or area, but do not allow for multiple, separately controllable, heat sources that can vary the locations of a cooking surface to which they provide heat. Also, they only have one, or very few, positions of tilt, and do not safely secure the tilt of a cooking portion. Known devices allow for setting timing and temperature, and sometimes tilt, but not rotation direction or speed. Furthermore, known devices do not allow for automated programming or setting of all of the parameters of time, temperature, direction and rotation speed individually or collectively with respect to each other and other parameters.
Thus, known devices, due to the limited features of settings, tilt, accessories, speed, and rotation, limit the types of food or substances that can successfully be prepared in the device. Thus, there is a need in the art to address and rectify the shortcomings of the known cooking devices.